


In the still of the night

by Blake



Category: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Genre: BDSM, Canon Compliant, M/M, Under-negotiated Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 08:40:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20991947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: “How is it that you are so beautiful?” Ali asks, startling Lawrence away from his reverie with the fire. He’s grown used to the presence of Ali’s strong, steady silence by his side during these rare quiet moments in between raids and meetings and travel. The sound of his voice warms Lawrence from the inside out, unlike the too-hot blaze of the fire that singes the hairs on his skin.A collection of ficlets and drabbles.





	1. In the still of the night

**Author's Note:**

> These were all written for writing challenges I did based on song titles and lyrics. Poorly negotiated kink holds as a warning for all of them.

The moon is too bright for you to go to him. You would cast a shadow that even sleeping men would see as you passed their tents, your figure cutting darkly across the shining desert like a photograph cast in silver, as obvious and incriminating as the brown of week-old burns spread across his pale, milky thigh.

The men know very much, but they must not know this. They see only the ways in which you have changed him: the clothes you have given him to wear, the sun-darkened skin of his face and neck, his deepened, steadier seat on a camel, how _Arab _you have made him. They know that you love him, and they assume it is the same way that they love him. They know that you invite him to sleep in your tent sometimes, but they think you do so just to entertain their amusing, magical European trickster of a god, to give pleasure and pain to this strange creature who requires both, to converse in tongues you both learned in foreign lands.

They see nothing of the ways that he has twisted you into something you never were before. They can’t see the flattened, polished surface of your teeth from grinding against the constant surge of your want. They can’t see the sick curl in your stomach more potent than bad water, something between pride and disgust, when you see him on a camel, his seat strong and steady despite the burns and bruises across his thighs, and you cannot tell if he seems comfortable _because _of the pain of the things he asked you to do to him, or if he seems comfortable because of the cleaning and tending to and kissing of those wounds, the care which you begged him to endure. They can’t hear your quiet gasps of reverence when your desperate hands roam all over his body, mapping his bones and flesh like the craters of the moon, always known but somehow never familiar. They can’t see your instinctive smile when he comes to your tent, arriving like the cool relief of a night breeze that kisses the soles of your feet.

They can’t see that you love him more than fiercely than you thought was humanly possible, that you want _impossible _things from him: an entire lifetime of him under the stars, in your tent, in your clothes, arching under your hands, laughing at your jokes until his eyes water, crying into your shoulder when you’ve broken him enough as though the tears are the release he’s been seeking all along and you are the only person he trusts to draw them out. You love him so much you fear you will be left as dry and cracked as the once-vibrant land, as bruised and twisted into something foreign as your country may be, something it was never meant to be, something that has been touched by pale and clever hands.

Tomorrow, if the moon is less bright, you will go to him and tell him, again, “I love you.” You will look into the silver shine of his eyes in the dark and you will feel sure, for a moment, again, that he sees how you love him, that he sees what no one else can. He will see that you have become the kind of man who loves the moon more than the God who made it, the kind of man whose love can be returned.

Tonight, you watch the shadow of his tent stretch across the desert as the glowing moon teases across the mountaintops as though searching for a safe place to land. 


	2. You're the top

“How is it that you are so beautiful?” Ali asks, startling Lawrence away from his reverie with the fire. He’s grown used to the presence of Ali’s strong, steady silence by his side during these rare quiet moments in between raids and meetings and travel. The sound of his voice warms Lawrence from the inside out, unlike the too-hot blaze of the fire that singes the hairs on his skin. 

“Who, me?” Lawrence brings another bite of food to his mouth, pretending to be coy instead of genuinely surprised. Back in England, and in Cairo, before Ali, no one ever called him beautiful. Odd, effeminate, clever, obedient, disobedient, but never beautiful. He’s grown deeply attached to the way Ali looks at him, stripped naked, clothed in his Bedou riding habit, covered in dirt.

“Yes, you,” Ali answers in his matter-of-fact way. His brown eyes glow red in the firelight, his skin covered in a sheen of gold. Before Lawrence, Ali had never been called beautiful before, either. Lawrence is sure of it.

“No, you don’t understand,” Lawrence assures him. He’ll never stop making these attempts to convey to Ali just how utterly, absolutely, devastatingly worthless he is. “I’m not beautiful at all. I’m as low as scum, in fact. I only pretend I’m the son of God to amuse you.”

The exaggerated blasphemy of the last, least sincere bit appears to smack Ali like the strike of a hand, but he hardly flinches as he turns to stare into the fire. Lawrence feels bad; he always feels bad, because he’s actually quite a loathsome person and has every right to.

“But if I’m the bottom,” Lawrence continues, making a loud gesture of bringing his hand flat and low to the ground. He waits until he’s sure Ali’s watching and then sets his bowl down to bring his second hand on top of the other, clasping them together. “You’re the top.” He smiles privately, thinking of how often Ali is physically on top of him, though he doubts Ali is thinking of such things right now.

“Who, me?” Ali spits back at him, always so damned clever at wielding Lawrence’s own words against him. He’s the most beautiful thing Lawrence has ever seen, standing straight as an arrow, spine reaching straight for the heavens, the best and surest thing to cling to.

“Yes, you.” Lawrence glances briefly around the fire, certain that the few men who are paying them any attention will be easy to lose with anything more than simple English. “You’re the Coliseum, Ali,” Lawrence murmurs, sidling close enough that their hands can touch, laid out flat on the blanket. “You’re the… You’re as magnificent as the… the smile on the Mona Lisa. You belong in the Louvre Museum. You’re the finest brandy I ever tasted.”

Ali gives him a warning look at that, either aroused or reprimanding—or perhaps both—at the mention of taste in reference to himself. He should know by now that Lawrence can’t get enough.

“You are ridiculous,” Ali tells him fiercely, looking back into the fire.

Lawrence nods sagely, letting his pinky finger brush against Ali’s. “That’s precisely what I’ve been trying to tell you.”


	3. Just one of those things

It’s not the first time he turns from you, but his body is cold and solid and he rolls heavy as death, and you sense that it may be the last.

“What is the matter?” you ask, fearing the worst and knowing that the worst things to happen to him are often worthy of whispers. You reach for the bones of his hip, and he neither presses into nor flinches away from your touch. You ache, remembering Deraa, how he was hurt so badly it took you weeks to coax him into receiving anything besides pain and violence, which you absolutely could not give him, after Deraa. You worry that something like that has happened again, something terrible enough to break the spirit of a madman. Something you will need to spend weeks, or months, helping him recover from. “Has something happened?”

“No, Ali, nothing’s happened.” His hushed voice nearly disappears in the dim light of your lantern.

You settle closer to him, on your side with his spine to your front, the rustling of fabric the only sound inside. Perhaps, if you sleep, he will wake up smiling again.

“It’s just over. Between us.”

“What?” you hiss, too frustrated to be concerned, or too concerned to be anything but frustrated.

He sounds far away, voice lost under dozens of masks and shrouds. “It’s all finished. We’ve had a jolly good go of it.”

_You must be joking_, you want to say, but you know that he rarely jokes about his own self-destructive decisions. You think of all the times he’s kissed you like your mouth was a well in the desert, the only thing keeping him alive. You think of how his body naturally follows yours like a palm tree leaning toward the light. You think of how he finally let you clean his festering wounds.

“It was just,” he whispers on, perhaps imagining you’ve voiced some counterpoint, “One of those things. Bound to end sometime or another.” He always sounds most English when he most hates himself. His voice is too light and manic, but he won’t let you ground him in the earth, in his body, not tonight. Or perhaps he would, but you don’t have the heart to. There are many things you absolutely cannot do, after Deraa.

“I love you.” Patient as you’ve learned to become, you keep your hand on his hip, since he does not seem to be leaving. You love him, but how can you trust the wisdom of a man who runs away from everything except pain and destruction, who demands that people love him and then abandons their love when he needs it most? “And I hate you,” you murmur when you realize it is still true.

If your statement changes anything, he gives no indication, but he sleeps fitfully in your arms.


	4. Make me think at the end of the day some great reward will be coming my way

Lawrence’s red, weathered hand slips under the top of Ali’s pants. Ali notices the dirt caked under his too-long nails before he feels the touch. “No,” he hisses with a smack to that delicate wrist.

Lawrence crowds closer, pinning Ali to the ground in the grey morning light, his face tucking against Ali’s neck, tender as a kiss. “But I want you. _Ali_.”

Ali’s eyes fall shut against the grey. He surges into the pressure of Lawrence’s hand, but he can’t cede to this wave when he knows it’s not what Lawrence wants most. The reason Ali can have these sweet moments of sleeping breath and personal, meaningful, warm touch is that he earns them by giving Lawrence what he wants most.

He holds Lawrence away with a tight grip around his wrist until his fingers shrivel away in defeat. “You may not receive what you have not earned,” he chides in a whisper, his voice weakened by feeling. He almost lets himself wish that Lawrence will ignore him, stay close and warm and peaceful.

But Lawrence looks up at him with glassy eyes, pupils wide and black, breath shivering out between his thin, parted lips. Ali knows how to give him what he most wants: “We must travel fifty miles today. If you must take breaks, I will be disappointed. If you ride well, and make the journey without complaint, _then_we shall see if you deserve your reward.”

_Greedy, barbarous, cruel_. Ali hears the words in his head too often, the words of what Lawrence wants, _needs_him to be. The things that Lawrence makes him be, just to have the breathtaking glory of making Lawrence happy, which Ali cannot live without.

Ali kisses Lawrence’s cheek, drawing all the sweetness he can from such a small touch, pushing all his love into it, like pouring water over hard, cracked soil that cannot absorb it without stakes violently driven deep to break the earth apart, a well carved deep from which to drink from time to time.

“Yes, Sir,” Lawrence whispers, already drawing away and readying his things for the journey.

Ali rubs his fingertips over his own lips, and watches. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is for the prompt "snowed in" and is dedicated to my dear friend Chi for their birthday!
> 
> Thanks to all of you who've been reading. You all are the nicest fandom.

“You have made this happen.” Ali’s eyes shine in the lamplight as he looks out the window. They always absorbed firelight and sunlight, drawing in red hues instead of reflecting white. It strikes Lawrence as strange, in this moment, that he has never looked at Ali’s eyes in electric light until this moment. 

“I have done no such thing,” Lawrence says coolly, sliding deeper into the Egyptian cotton sheets. He studies Ali’s profile as the snow continues to fall, relentless flurries pooling in the darkness. “It is written.”

That gets Ali’s attention, black eyes burning, the ball of muscle at the seat of his jaw clenching. It hits Lawrence like a sip of brandy, numbing his lips and heating his veins. Lawrence’s body remembers the thrill of winning Ali’s attention better than the rest of him does. He curls in and shifts closer to the dip where Ali’s sitting on the edge of the bed, skin against skin and the chance to grab Ali by the thick curls on his head and drag him down for a wet, swollen kiss.

“I am due back in London tomorrow,” Ali murmurs, while Lawrence kisses the words off his lips.

Lawrence squeezes his handful of curls more tightly. “I’m afraid you shall not be in London tomorrow,” he says airily.

Ali bites down into the kiss, as if in protest, or gratitude, of the fact that he would be here, instead. Lawrence wills his blood to the surface of the thin skin of his lips, an offering he never gets to taste, either because his command over his own blood is too weak, or because the pull of Ali’s sweeping mouth is too strong. 

He never expected to be in this situation, Ali in his home, Ali in his four-poster bed, Ali in England at all. He’d thought of it, of course, as anyone would think of a lover coming back and fixing everything that went wrong, but he had never been able to truly picture Ali amidst the green grass and white snow. Funny, how one can recall the shape of a man’s face twisted in every stage of agony, ecstasy, anger, and acceptance, but the imagination cannot stretch to predict the reflection of a light bulb’s shine on brown eyes.

“You are insufferable,” Ali hisses, his tongue a snake twisting between Lawrence’s lips. It’s exactly what he said before kissing Lawrence for the first time on English soil that afternoon, except it wasn’t a kiss, at first, it was a bite on the shoulder, deep and bruising, but mostly needy, seeking something Lawrence was never qualified to give. Answers, perhaps, or apologies.

Lawrence didn’t have a suitable response that afternoon, and he doesn’t have one now, either. He knows very well that he’s insufferable. He knows that he’s made a mess of everything he tried to right in the world, and he knows he’s absolutely unworthy of being touched by someone so beautiful and noble as Ali. It’s embarrassing to have Ali set foot in his wretched country, to see the ugliness of its stiff upper lips and twitching noses, to witness how its rolling green hills are more barren, in most ways, than all the dry sand they ever walked across together in the cradle of all civilization. It’s embarrassing to have Ali see where he lives, to have him greeted by the housekeeper at the door and led through the cold, echoing, stone hallways.

It’s embarrassing to have Ali break down after two hours of stately, tense conversation about politics, to have Ali kiss him like something that renders men helpless. It’s embarrassing to expose his skin, blanched even more from two years in England, as pale as the white cotton sheets of the bed he eagerly begged Ali to take him to, as pale as the snow thrusting into the ground outside. It was embarrassing to let Ali swallow him down, as though he’s worth tasting at all, instead of merely taken from.

All Lawrence wants is to be insufferable, but to be wanted, anyways. To be wanted because he is insufferable.

“Show me,” he asks, greedily grazing his hand over the dark hair across Ali’s chest, over the round muscles of his shoulder, and down his arm, just to grab his still familiar hand and drag it down between his legs.

Ali’s moustache scrapes rougher as he bears down, pushing Lawrence down into his soft bed and weighing heavily onto him, sheets twisting between their legs and tangling them together. A laugh tumbles across Lawrence’s raw lips. Lawrence blinks, eyes opening wide to capture the moment, because he can’t remember ever hearing Ali’s laughter before. He knows he must have heard it, but he can’t remember.

There are tears gathering on the graceful, short arch of Ali’s eyelashes. Perhaps those tears were the cause of the reflection in his eyes, and it has nothing to do with the electric light or the white of snow holding them hostage here together, to sort out past wrongs and heal wounds that had no right to be healed.


End file.
